Completed - Army of Two Devil's Cartel

It's a shame that most co-op games on the 360 are shooters, after many years of playing these the genre has now become tiring. We still went ahead & completed this game but I would be lying if I said it was an enjoyable experience.

Just ticking off the various missions until the cartel was destroyed leading to a final showdown with Salem.

Game Over. Done. Finish. Complete & with it possibly the last 360 co-op game.

Army of Two - Co-op Carnage

Not had much time to play much gaming the past week on the consoles but I did get some time to co-op with Abbas on Army of Two.

The game has a mission based structure with some taking longer than others (especially if we die & have to respawn to the last checkpoint). There have been some nice gameplay moments which include a nice driving section with the other player on a mounted gun & a slide down a hallway with a building exploding (reminds of some gameplay I saw on Bulletstorm).

The game seems to have done away with the back to back feature from the previous game which had you taking out a large number of enemies whilst having your back to your co-op partner.

Earlier in the game there was a mission set in the past in which we rescued a hostage named Fiona who we now meet up five years later & she informs us of the cartel's hideout which is in a church.

Army of Two - Devil's Cartel

The 360 console has been the king of local co-op gaming from the Lego games to Halo & Gears of War but Army of Two for me has been the co-op shooter series. Mission based, agro fueled, bullet spraying chaos.

The Devils Cartel continues the series fine tuned experience giving you the armory section to specialise your weapons & purchase new upgrades. Customise your character with unique masks & camouflage your armour or weapons.

The story in this game is your usual South American cartel affair nothing original but the missions so far have been very fast paced & have thrown up a few nice moments inc sniping whilst inside a helicopter & manning a turret to defend your co-op player.

Aggro remains from the previous games & you can use it to attract the attention of enemies whilst the other player flanks to take them out. The few missions we have completed have not shown the series rock, paper & scissors joke or the back to back sequence yet.

You are escorting a politician convoy that comes under attack from the cartels gunmen who seemed to be pretty well equipped with rocket launchers & grenades. A flashback gives you a tutorial mission & also an opportunity to meet up with the series protagonists Rios & Salem for a mission.

This may potentially be our last local co-op game for the 360 & so far it's an enjoyable experience.

Army of Two 40th Day - Game Over

Army of Two 40th Day completed with still 3 days to go until the 14th (Halo Reach) the game now continues in that you have to track down Jonas, along the way we had to blown up 2 Anti Aircraft guns & destroy a crane to explode a ship. Amazing set pieces that build towards Jonas hideout. You also get to fight smaller bosses like the grenade launcher & quite a few shotgun officers but the soldiers with RPGs are the worse on contractor difficulty, 1 rocket & you are down for the count. After climbing a set of stairs to the top of the temple you finally come face to face with Jonas.

Expecting a final boss showdown we went in with full ammo & ready to kick ass but only to be met with another "make a choice" dialogue ??!! What an anti-climax . Go for the obvious option to shoot Jonas & well done you have completed the game.

Very disappointed with the ending was expecting a tough final boss fight. You can download DLC which continues the story but with Halo Reach only days away I will give it a miss. It is an enjoyable co-op game but the storyline is weak. I would say the original is better because the 40th day is just more of the same style of gun shooting fist bumping action. Now a breather for a few days until the 14th ....

Army of Two 40th Day - Custom Weapons

Onto Chapter 5, weapon customising is a must in this game to tinker your weapons to your preferred style. A machine gun with a scope add-on & high magazine is a must for me but I need to balance out the other add-ons like barrel & front mount to ensure I have a high precision vs a low agro. A couple of big set pieces in this level we had to try again because for once on hardcore the game became difficult. Especially when you have run out of ammo on your main gun & have to resort to using the enemies gun. I think we are near the end of the game, need to finish quickly before the 14th.

Army of Two 40th Day - You have a choice

Throughout the game at various points you will get asked to make a choice on your actions. Do you let someone live or die? Do you go down one route or the other? These moral choices have some impact on the game, you will only be able to access certain areas if you have made the correct choices. Now I wish I had know about this before then maybe I would not have made the bad choice to get some extra money for upgrading weapons. If you are going to play the game more than once then I suppose you can go through it playing evil & good. But I'm only going to play the game once, I need to finish it off before Halo Reach. Looks like I've missed out on a new weapon then, now I wish I had let that tiger loose in the zoo just to see what would have happened? The achievements are still glitchy on this game with actionabbas missing out on the end of chapter 4 achievement. We might have to go back and do the chapter again because I don't want him to miss out on the end of game achievement.

Army of Two 40th Day - Hostages & Ammo Crates

In each chapter you always have a certain number of hostages to save & ammo crates where you can collect either money or unlock weapon parts but, there is always a BUT !!

When saving hostages you must kill all the enemies before they assassinate the hostage, not always easy however. You can go in all guns blazing & hope you kill all the enemies before they kill the hostages, this may work but usually the hostage ends up dying either by being assassinated or caught in the crossfire. The best tactic is to use mock surrender which buys you a few more seconds for your co-op partner to get a good spot to start picking a few off & then finish off the left overs.

Similar scenario with ammo crates you have to kill all the enemies before they can get to the crate to lock it shut. Once it's shut you cannot open it.

Luckily today Abbas & I managed to complete Chapter 3 saving all the hostages & collecting all the loot from the ammo crates (Yes we did have to try a few of them again & again & again .....& again)

I had fun trying to get 100 sniper kills (cue quote from Abbas "Wow !! you are really good at headshots dad") to unlock that achievement, whilst Abbas went for the 400 kills with Assault Rifles.

Army of Two 40th Day

The advantages of having a 12 year old son is that I can now enjoy local co-op gaming, this brings with it unfortunately some disadvantages in that in some games he is much better than me most notably Halo 3 & any driving game. We have now completed quite a few Xbox 360 co-op games ( I will post a complete list another day) the most recent being Gears of War 2. Having completed that we had Army of Two 40th day ready to unwrap & install to the 360 hard drive.

Warning this game has glitchy achievements which have not been patched by EA, especially the softcore (50g) achievement. I did not get this on our first run so after debating with Abbas we started the game again on 1 save file ensuring we did not select chapters but just using the continue option on the save file.

Upon starting the game you get to choose your character I'm Rios & Abbas is Salem & then the difficulty. Do we go easy, normal or contractor (Hard)?  Contractor it is then because we are only going to play the game once so we might as well get as many achievements along the way. After basic training session we get let loose to customise our weapons I'm happy with my pimped out Scar, whilst Abbas chooses a M4 assault rifle. There are some collectibles in the game Radio's & Neko cats, get these all (2 in each chapter I think) to get some easy achievements.

Back to the game we have played Chapter 1 & 2 on our first attempt so this time we ran through these again quite quickly but I forget to pick up the cats in Chapter 2 (something to maybe come back to later). If you have played the first Army of Two game then  this is more of the same but in a different setting. We have just completed Chapter 2 killing the Big Boss on our 4th attempt !!